Fuzzy Logic Producer’s report for 13 August

Producer: Janine
Contributors: Jacinta and Rebecca


We completely threw out the standard Fuzzy Logic format and decided to rely on our natural wit, talent and vast knowledge of lots of useless things to have an hour-long conversation based loosely around the Australian Science Festival.

With this in mind, we made a huge list of the things we wanted to talk about then competed to see how to segue them together in the most creative way.

It ran something like this (spot the connections if you can):

• Maths writing competition
• Importance of the invention of the number zero – incidentally by an ancient Indian civilisation
• Decimal versus older measurements
• A foot is the distance between the crease of your elbow and your wrist (complete with on-air testing of said theory, contortions of feet to arms) – and the realisation that Bec’s not quite proportioned like that (she's quite tall, whereas I'm fairly short).
• Marfan’s syndrome and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man
• I was then going to a break and called myself Jacinta by accident, which was a good lead into the National Memory Test as part of Science Week. Everyone (deservedly) laughed heartily at my stupidity.
  

We dew breath during the song and launched into it after a call from Leigh, who was ‘nearly running off the road due to pissing herself laughing whilst driving’.

Act 2:

• Academy of Science lecture on mammals and weird sex
• Alignment and behaviour of sea urchin sperm
• Ultrasounds affecting the brains of unborn mice
• Elevated testosterone levels in athletes – how realistic is Landis’s claim of his not having taken anything?
• Open day at the Australian Institute of Sport and Tidbinbilla tracking station
• Another Mars hoax doing the rounds
• Mars rovers celebrate their birthday (we thought it was their second)
  

Act 3:

• Sphinx cats with no hair, but colouration on their skins that indicate what their coat colour would have been
• Hippos sweating blood (not really, and we wondered whether it was iron making the sweat red)
• Elephants make their way to specific salt licks to ingest minerals
• Yak’s milk is pink and high fat (v good for high altitude nutrition)
• Magnesium deficiency in cows, importance in muscle metabolism
• Back to coat colours in cats, dogs and zebras – and that individuals zebras can be identified by the stripes on their butts
• Schrödinger’s cat – vague biologist explanation to freak Bec out
• Quantum computing
• Fire research at CSIRO and fire-proof ceramics
  

Another song, more wonder at how we can link seemingly unconnected ideas together and made the final sprint for home:

• Roundup of Science Festival events for the coming week
• Tobin Brothers open day – respect for the dead
• Forensics
• Skills shortage – broadly based on recently released DEST audit
• Importance of taxonomy in Australian science
  

And that filled an hour.

I taped the show, the reception is a little rough in patches, but I will look at finding a way to get snippets on the blog.

Much fun was had in the studio – reports indicated that it translated into people’s homes (I know Dean is still laughing that I forgot my own name).

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